I am in complete awe of you.

Not casually, but unapologetically obsessed. In a way that rearranges a person.

You are breathtaking.

I love the way you walk into rooms that were not built for you and transform them. I love how you carry softness in one hand and grit in the other. The way you nurture the sacred revolution; how you feed it and protect it and correct it when it drifts. You love people enough to demand more from them.

You are fierce in a way that feels holy. You choose integrity when it would be easier to choose approval. You say no when they expect compliance and say yes to yourself even when no one else is clapping. When you are misunderstood, you stay anyway. You are tired and still show up.

And I love you for it.

I love the way you nurture each other. The way you check in. The way you hold crying friends with one arm and hold the line with the other. How you build group chats and gardens and bail funds and mutual aid lists and safe spaces and whole new worlds from scratch. The architects of liberation.

You.

Watching you makes my pulse quicken. You make me want to be braver, to want to risk more. You make me want to stop negotiating with my own power. When you speak, I feel my own throat open. When you refuse to shrink, something inside me grows. When you love loudly and resist fiercely, I feel permission to do the same.

You are who I aspire to be because you are fearless in your growth; you apologize when you’re wrong, learn, and evolve. You sharpen yourselves and each other. You don’t fossilize.

You are alive. Electric. Dangerous in the most beautiful way.

You are the reason I believe change is possible. You are the reason I believe tenderness and rebellion are not opposites. You are the reason I keep choosing courage over comfort. You are the reason I don’t give up when it would be easier to disengage.

I am inspired by your audacity and steadied by your conviction. I am lit up by your very existence. If I ever become half as brave, half as devoted, half as revolutionary as you—I will consider my life well-lived.

Thank you for refusing to stay in line. For refusing to behave. For nurturing the future. Thank you for making me want to rise.

Ferally in love,

A woman who is watching you and becoming

I don’t know when the last time you got a love letter was, but I hope you feel loved after reading this one. Please share with other brave women that need to hear how loved they are. And if you feel moved to, my tip jar is below—but you reading to the end is treat enough <3

Tip Jar

How could I
Keep smooth skin
When my sisters
Around the world
Are dying?

My worry for them
Contorts my face
When a girl
Is forced
To be a man’s
Possession
When a child
IS RAPED
After her family
Is murdered
And her village
Is pillaged

Frown lines drawn in
By the mass suicides
Of my sisters who
Refuse to be prey
And those with a message:
That if our bodies
Are to be objects
To be used
And discarded
Then let them be
Fuel for the rebellion

Lines crack
Over my knuckles
For every time
I
She
They
We
Fought back
Fingers tired of clutching
Holding onto our lives

Deep grooves
Separate my brows
As young girls
—Our babies—
One by one
Become prey
To the system
To obey
To breed
To labor
To die at the hands of men

Oh, but my tongue…
Is sharp
And my voice
Unwavering
My heart
On Fire

Into the ears
Of young women
And girls
I speak the fury
Of generations
Keeping alive
The memory
Of the suffering
Of the injustice
Of the abuse
Of the grief
Of the women
Before us
So we never forget
The beginning
So we can change
The end.

My anger spills
Out of every wrinkle
Occupying empty space
Empty heads
Empty mouths
Still-empty wombs
Around me
Creating the army
We need
To survive
Awakening in girls
Their power
Their fury
Their resistance

And I

Will

Not

Stop.

Tip Jar

A young woman stands between armed Israeli soldiers and Palestinian children. Her body is a barrier. Her voice, steady and unmistakable, orders the soldiers to stop shooting. Behind her, children scatter to safety while guns point directly at her chest.

That woman is Huwaida Arraf.

And before that moment, she was not a legend. She was a daughter of Palestinian immigrants. A college graduate. A woman who believed the American story: that democracy meant something, that justice was real, and that freedom was more than a slogan.

One could say she was ordinary—until the world demanded otherwise.

This is the story about what happens when an ordinary woman reaches the limits of indignation. When looking away becomes impossible.

If you’ve ever wondered whether you could be brave enough, read on. This one’s for you.

The iconic video of Huwaida Arraf standing between Israeli soldiers and Palestinian children.

The First Lie Cracks

Huwaida was five years old when the fairytale fractured.

She was visiting family in the West Bank, clutching her American passport like a promise. She had absorbed the narrative she’d been given: America is good. Free. America stands on the side of justice. One day, she even dreamed of becoming its president.

Then came the checkpoints. The soldiers. The moment her aunt couldn’t join them to visit the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. So it was at five years old that Huwaida learned freedom had borders—and her family was on the wrong side of them.

She recalled writing a letter to President Bush about her cousin, who had been detained, beaten, tortured by Israeli forces. The president never replied.

This is how it starts for so many women. Not with speeches or slogans. Just a quiet, devastating realization: the world is not what you were told. Injustice is not abstract. It has a face, a uniform, and a checkpoint keeping your aunt from going to church.

Choosing Resistance Over Comfort

After college, Huwaida could have returned to the United States and built a comfortable, forgettable life. Instead, she went to Palestine. It was meant to be temporary—just a year before law school.

Then the Second Intifada erupted.

She stayed.

She co-founded the International Solidarity Movement, twice nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. She stood in front of tanks and broke curfews to bring food and medicine to families locked inside their homes. She used her American passport as a tool, placing it between soldiers and civilians, and when guns were raised, she spoke English. She stood her ground.

When she’s asked how she found the courage, she says, “It was indignation.”

That’s how courage usually shows up. Not trumpeted or heroic. It is outrage sharpened into action. A refusal to accept that violence gets to rule unchallenged.

She knew she might lose her hands. She stayed anyway.

This Is Women

Many women know that Huwaida’s body in front of bullets is indicative of a broader pattern.

In 2016, Ieshia Evans stood still on a Baton Rouge highway as militarized police charged toward her. She wore a simple dress. She raised no weapon. She did not shout. The state came at her armored, armed, furious.

She did not move.

The image burned itself into collective memory for the same reason Huwaida’s did: a woman refusing to make herself smaller when violence demands obedience.

Years earlier, Malala Yousafzai took a bullet to the head for insisting that girls deserved classrooms instead of silence. Her crime was believing children deserved futures. Her punishment was meant to be fatal.

Different places. Different regimes. Same response from power when women defend the innocent.

These women are not exceptions.

Ieshia Evans standing calmly as police rush toward her in Baton Rouge.

Motherhood as Defiance

In 2002, Huwaida married Adam Shapiro, a Jewish-American activist. The backlash was immediate and vicious. Tabloids smeared them. Extremists doxxed his family. The FBI intervened.

Later, when Huwaida became pregnant, she made a decision that unsettled even allies: she would give birth in Palestine.

Not in an American hospital. Not with her husband by her side (he had been deported). But in Jerusalem, at a Palestinian hospital, while Israeli police attacked youth outside with tear gas and live threat.

She did this twice.

Why? Because Israeli law would only allow her to pass citizenship to her children if they were born there. Because she refused to let bureaucracy sever their connection to home.

She labored alone, under occupation, so her children would never be fully erased from their own history. This is resistance too: creating life under siege and claiming the future when the present is under assault. Motherhood is not passive. It is feral, strategic, and political.

Huwaida Arraf educates students on Palestinian resistance at Penn State.

Sailing Into the Siege

When someone suggested sailing a boat to Gaza to break the blockade, Huwaida thought it was reckless. They had no boats. No money. No experience.

But Gaza was being starved. Children were malnourished. Pregnant women were anemic. An entire population was being punished for existing.

So in August 2008, Huwaida boarded a fishing boat with 43 others from 17 countries. Israel threatened interception. They trained for worst-case scenarios anyway.

No one backed out.

When they reached Gaza, thousands of people waited. Kids dove into the water. Fishermen rowed out. What looked like rocks transformed into a sea of people—crying, waving, alive. For a moment, Gaza was not alone.

Gaza Freedom Flotilla, 2008.

The Price

In 2010, Israeli forces stormed the flotilla. Ten activists were killed. Huwaida was beaten unconscious, dragged into a van, punched again. Yet no one was held accountable.

The world moved on, but she didn’t.

She organized again. And again. In 2024, she stood ready to sail during a genocide—5,000 tons of aid prepared. Israel pressured the flag state. The mission was delayed, not defeated.

Then one day, Huwaida’s son told her, “You don’t even care about us. All you care about is Gaza.”

This is the fracture women live with: loving our children while refusing to abandon the world they’re inheriting. The guilt of being split in two. The fear they’ll remember our exhaustion more than our laughter.

She keeps going anyway. Many of us do.

Because our children need to know that helplessness is a lie power tells you to keep you obedient. There is always something that can be done.

What Huwaida Leaves Us With

Huwaida Arraf has been beaten, arrested, deported, silenced, and threatened for decades. She’s given birth under occupation and carried guilt alongside resistance. While she is remarkable, she is still a woman who saw injustice and refused to accept it.

Resistance does not belong to the extraordinary. It belongs to women who stop swallowing lies. Women who place their bodies between violence and the vulnerable. Who stand firm when the state demands submission.

The world will punish you for speaking. For standing. For refusing to comply.

Do it anyway.
Stand anyway.
Sail anyway.
Run anyway.
Give birth to the future anyway.

Huwaida was ordinary until the moment she said no.

And so are you.

The resistance continues. And somewhere, a woman is reading this and realizing: I could do that.

Yes, you could.
You can.
And you will.

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It was always women.

Yet no one was outright saying it. At a time when traditional gender roles were—and still are—being pushed by our long-standing patriarchal systems of oppression; when conservative ideologies yearn to reestablish women’s value as coming exclusively from their service to their families rather than their contributions to humankind; a time when men are statistically known to commit violent crimes and can no longer gaslight us by calling themselves “protectors…” It is clear why women’s voices would be silenced. It becomes obvious, then, that the real protectors of humanity are women, but their role must remain invisible in order to maintain the “protector” lie alive. The patriarchy has always systemically erased the contributions of women and femmes; if they were properly documented, they would reduce the contributions of men to what they really are: selfish endeavors to make themselves comfortable which tangentially helped everyone else. The progress made by men was for men. We got crumbs and were told to appreciate them.

But baby, it’s 2026 and we see those crumbs for what they are. Women like me, who have known and loved the most well-meaning and least-harmful men, know that it is all men. In fact, those men know it, too. Because the patriarchy digs its claws into everything and everyone. No one is spared. Not me. Not you. We were all told that men built entire civilizations; that they discovered fire, hunted mammoths, and invented society as we know it. White supremacy, patriarchy’s equally evil twin, has been lurking in the background, too. But read the first sentence again: this is 2026. Our stories will not die this time. I refuse to let white men take the credit of women who are leading resistance movements, putting themselves in harm’s way to protect the innocent, driving technological and scientific innovation, and exposing the most powerful people on the planet in their pursuit of justice. Not on my watch.

So About The Furies

Despite being agnostic for as long as I can remember, the Furies of Greek mythology have always intrigued me. Tragically, like most “angry feminists,” they were born from violence. When Cronus castrated his father Uranus, the blood that hit the earth gave birth to three daughters: Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone. They emerged from a most fundamental betrayal—a son’s violence against his father—and became the pursuers of those who violated natural order. They hunted down murderers, oath-breakers, those who harmed family, those who abused the vulnerable. They were older than the Olympian gods themselves, and so they answered to something deeper than man-made justice systems.

What men saw in these women were monsters, but they failed to recognize how they merely reflect the monstrosities they bear witness to. When the structures meant to protect people failed, when the powerful harmed the powerless, when oaths were broken and blood was spilled, the Furies appeared.

In Aeschylus’ Eumenides, Athena offers the Furies a transformation. She asks them to stop the cycle of vengeance and become protectors instead. They accept, become the Eumenides—“well-meaning ones”—and Athens honors them as guardians of the city’s prosperity. They went from seeking out blood to building something new. From fury to protection. From further destroying what was broken to defending what must survive.

This feels like an appropriate parallel to this work. Women responding to violations of natural order—genocide, bodily autonomy stripped away, war and injustice—with righteous fury. But we are responding. We are building mutual aid networks. Organizing legal defense funds. Creating the infrastructure of care that systems refuse to provide simply because we are women. We are using our anger to build. We, like the Eumenides, are transforming dormant rage into sacred protection, and turning fury into the foundation of something worth leaving for our children.

The patriarchy wants women furious but powerless, or powerful but demure. The women I’m writing about refuse both of these. The women I’m writing about know that there are many dimensions to our experiences—and that nuance is very much lost on the patriarchy.

The ✨Vision✨

Tales of the Furies documents women-led resistance in real time. I’ll be out in the field—at protests, at organizing meetings, in the spaces where women are leading from the frontlines—capturing what’s unfolding as it happens. Every weekend, you’ll get a full Tales feature that takes one woman’s work and puts it in context: how her strategy connects to historical resistance movements, why her approach matters, and what we can learn from watching her act. I’ll also cover women making international headlines and women organizing tenant unions in places you’ve never heard of. Because both matter.

Ultimately, what I’m writing here are honest accounts of courage and strategy. What risks women are taking, what they’re building, what’s working and what isn’t. I’ll be spotlighting the heroic actions of women driving grassroots movements, discussing how we can learn from successful resistance movements and their modern applications, and I’ll even be sharing practical resources to keep you baddies sharp—tips on keeping yourself safe as an activist, digital safety, lawful resistance, and self-defense are all in my big witchy bag of tricks.

If you’re looking for both-sides centrism about genocide or fascism, this isn’t where you parked your car. But if you want to understand the power women bring to the resistance, if you want to learn about intersectionality and how women are building alternative systems to replace those that are failing us, and maybe figure out how you fit into that—welcome.

I think you’ll like it here.